Question 1

Cherokee County has no zoning. So what actually controls what I can build?

Accepted Answer

Three things, and none of them is a zoning district. First, the building code: S.C. Code § 6-9-10(A) requires every county in the State to enforce the Building Codes Council's codes and to enforce only those, and Cherokee County adopted them by ordinance at County Code § 6-1 effective 1 January 2023, with § 6-9 applying them to the entire unincorporated area. Second, Chapter 13 of the county code — the Cherokee County Uniform Land Development Regulations Ordinance — which is where the dimensional standards live. Section 13-87 sets a front setback of 35 feet on a local road, 45 on a collector and 55 on an arterial or primary road, ten feet at each side, 25 feet at the rear and ten feet from the side road on a corner lot; accessory structures keep the same front and side setbacks but may come to within eight feet of the rear line. Section 13-52 forbids creating a lot under half an acre and otherwise keys lot size to what the state health authority or the utility provider requires. Section 13-53 wants 100 feet of frontage. Section 13-57 caps the parcel at two residential structures. Third, the state septic regulation, which is a separate permit and which in practice decides more Upstate parcels than anything the county does. What you will not find is a zoning district, a permitted-use table, a rezoning, a special exception or a board of zoning appeals, because there is nothing for one to hear. The county has published a draft zoning ordinance and has been consulting on it; its own FAQ says the initial proposal would not have covered the entire county, and after the 21 October public information meeting the county said it was leaning toward more general land management rather than parcel-level zoning. A draft is not law — plan against Chapter 13, and ask Building Safety what has changed before you commit.

Question 2

Can the shop be bigger and taller than the house?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and in Cherokee County that is unusually easy to establish, because the county has published nothing that would stop it. In a zoned South Carolina county this question is usually settled by a district table capping an accessory building at some fraction of the dwelling's floor area and at a fixed height. There is no such table here. Chapter 13 is the only county document setting dimensional standards on a single-family lot, and its § 13-87 gives setbacks and nothing else — no maximum building height for a dwelling or an accessory structure, and no floor-area cap, ratio or square-footage ceiling on an accessory building. The whole chapter was read and searched: the only height limits in it attach to communication towers, to solar structures at fifteen feet and to wind turbines at one hundred seventy feet. What does still bind you is real enough. The ten-foot side yards, the 25-foot rear yard for the house and the eight-foot rear yard for a detached accessory building; the front setback for your road classification; the two-residential-structure cap in § 13-57 if you were thinking of a second dwelling as well; the structural provisions of the 2021 South Carolina Residential Code as the county enforces them, with the design wind and seismic values agreed with the building official because the State has published none for this county; and the septic system's own setbacks, which keep no part of the system within five feet of a building or under a driveway. If the shop and the living space share one continuous roof, none of the accessory-structure provisions apply at all — the whole thing is simply the primary structure and takes the primary structure's setbacks.

Question 3

What design wind speed and seismic design category should my engineer use here?

Accepted Answer

Ask the Cherokee County building official in writing, and be sceptical of any figure quoted without a publisher behind it. South Carolina does not use the residential code's national maps for houses: Regulation 8-1202 replaces IRC R301.2.1 and Regulation 8-1203 replaces R301.2.2.1 with the Building Codes Council's own county maps. Those maps exist for thirty-five of the forty-six counties — thirty-three drawn map PDFs plus whole-county text lines for Abbeville and York. Cherokee is one of the eleven with none, along with Anderson, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, McCormick, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg, Sumter and Union, which is essentially the entire Upstate. The Council's page was retrieved and enumerated and contains no occurrence of "Cherokee." That absence is the answer rather than a gap in the research: no South Carolina authority publishes an ultimate design wind speed or a seismic design category for this county. Both regulations say what happens next — "The local building official may delineate the wind design category within their jurisdiction provided that it does not surpass those provided on the Applied Technology Council (ATC) website," with the seismic modification worded the same way. There is a complication to raise with your engineer: the Council's own 2024 staff comment records that the ATC Hazards by Location site ceased operation on 31 December 2024 and points users to the ASCE Hazard Tool, and the 2024 modifications rewrite the code text to name that tool from 1 January 2027. Until then the honest position is that the delineation power sits with the local official, the numbers belong in the plan-review correspondence before a steel package or a truss order is placed, and the drawings should state which source and which values were used. The same goes for ground snow load, frost depth and winter design temperature: South Carolina leaves those cells to the jurisdiction, this county publishes none, and the twelve-inch minimum footing depth below undisturbed ground in R403.1.4 applies regardless.

Question 4

Can I put a camper on the land and live in it while I build?

Accepted Answer

Only after the house permit is issued, and Cherokee County has written the rule down rather than leaving it to the inspector's discretion. Section 13-89 of the land development regulations provides that, outside a recreational vehicle park, only one recreational vehicle may be connected to permanent power on the same parcel as the owner's primary residence — a stick-built or manufactured home — and that the RV must be properly titled and tagged with the state motor vehicle department. Then the sentence that governs bare ground: "Permanent power will not be issued to recreation vehicles on a parcel by itself, except under the following conditions: If the parcel owner is constructing a new single family residence, then a full application for a residential building permit (including all required submittals) and the corresponding approval must be obtained, and the fee paid in order for the electrical service to the recreational vehicle to be allowed." So the order is fixed and it is worth sequencing the whole project around: complete residential permit application, all submittals in, approval granted, fee paid — then power to the camper. And note what "all required submittals" includes on the county's own requirements sheet, because one item takes weeks rather than days: the state Septic Permit to Construct, or a statement that the site is on public sewer.

Question 5

What will the county charge me for the permit?

Accepted Answer

The fee is worked from a valuation, and the valuation has a floor. Cherokee County's Appendix A fee schedule prices a building permit in five bands on construction value: no fee at $1,000 and under unless an inspection is required, in which case $35.00 minimum per inspection; $35.00 for the first $1,000 plus $8.00 per additional thousand up to $50,000; $400.00 for the first $50,000 plus $6.00 per thousand to $100,000; $700.00 for the first $100,000 plus $5.00 per thousand to $500,000; and $2,530.00 for the first $500,000 plus $3.00 per thousand above that. The line that decides which band you land in reads: "Single Family/Duplex New Construction valuation for the purpose of permit issuance is based on provided valuation per the application or $150.00 per SF, whichever is greater." The county will not value a new dwelling below $150 a square foot however the building is actually procured, so the square footage on the drawings drives the fee. On top of the permit, a plan-checking fee equal to one-half the building permit fee applies wherever valuation exceeds $1,000 and plans are required, and the certificate of occupancy is $75.00. Site grading outside the scope of building permitting is $150.00. If you are splitting land, preliminary plat review is $75 plus $5 per lot to a $600 maximum and final plat review is $75 up to ten lots or $115 for eleven or more. A land-use variance application or an appeal to the board of adjustment and appeals is $50. Two warnings from the schedule itself: starting work before the permit is issued doubles the fees, and no plan review fee is refundable, with permit fees unrefundable after thirty days or after any on-site inspection. No impact fee appears on the published schedule, though the county does list an impact fee study among its capital and planning projects.

Question 6

Can I put the shell up as a farm building and finish the living space later?

Accepted Answer

No. S.C. Code § 6-9-65(A) defines a farm structure as one built on a farm "other than a residence or a structure attached to it," so a barndominium is outside the exemption from the first day and so is the shop half of a shouse, because it is attached to a residence. There is no square-footage test and no percentage-of-use test to work with. Subsection (C) makes the exemption conditional on an affidavit filed with the local building official before construction begins, and subsection (A) excludes any structure that originally qualified "but later converted to another use" — which is precisely what a later finish-out would be. Some South Carolina counties publish that affidavit as a downloadable form; Oconee, Colleton and Sumter do, and Spartanburg next door makes the owner swear its version before a notary. Cherokee County publishes no agricultural building statement at all: its Building Safety applications page lists commercial, residential, manufactured home, solar, floodplain, grading, land development, subdivision, demolition, pool, operational, duct-test and energy forms, and nothing agricultural among them. What the county does require of an owner-builder is a different sworn document, and it has teeth: the Disclosure Statement and Notice of Unlicensed Residential Builder must be filed as a matter of public record with the register of deeds, indexed under the owner's name in the grantor's index, before the exemption from residential builder licensing applies — and it warns that selling or renting the building within two years of completion raises a legal presumption that it was built for sale or rent, which the exemption does not allow. Permit the building as a dwelling from the start, with the shop bay in the drawings. It is cheaper than proving an unpermitted shell after the fact.

Question 7

What is the ground actually like, and where do the problems show up?

Accepted Answer

Mostly good, with two things to check. A query of the SSURGO soil database for the Cherokee County survey area returns 52,537 acres of Tatum, 44,410 of Cecil, 29,893 of Madison and 21,021 of Pacolet — the well-drained red and slate-belt Piedmont soils that build normally and ordinarily meet or exceed the residential code's presumptive bearing value for clay. Genuinely expansive mafic soil, the kind that heaves a slab and that S.C. Regulation 61-56 § 200.2 rules unsuitable for an onsite wastewater system where it carries substantial smectite, barely registers here: 2,061 acres of Iredell and 868 of Helena countywide, against Union County's 21,729 acres of Enon next door. The first thing to check is therefore not shrink-swell but depth. The same query returns 18,997 acres of Wilkes, a series classed as shallow with soft bedrock 10 to 20 inches down, 7,262 acres of Manteo, and 25,357 acres of Udorthents — the map unit for ground that has already been cut, filled or reworked. A wide slab-on-grade building with a long clear span is exactly the shape that suffers when one corner sits on rock and another on made ground, so a boring before the foundation is priced is cheap. The second thing to check is the septic evaluation, and to check it before closing rather than after. Cherokee County is above the Fall Line, so R.61-56 § 104.1(5) requires backhoe pits rather than hand borings, § 104.1(6) requires the parcel to be cleared, marked and staked before the evaluator arrives, and § 200.7(1) requires a usable repair area equal to at least half the original system. On a wide footprint, site the drainfield and its replacement area first and the building pad second.

Question 8

I want to split land off for family, or subdivide a few acres. What does the county allow?

Accepted Answer

There are three routes and they cost very different amounts. The lightest is § 13-164: division by will, by inheritance under the statute of descent and distribution, or by gift or transfer from one immediate family member to another is exempt from the land use regulations. "Immediate family" is defined narrowly — mother, father, spouse, children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters — and two conditions survive the exemption: the flag-lot rules in § 13-55 still apply, though the pole may be twenty-five feet rather than fifty, and every access point onto a public right-of-way must be at least twenty-five feet. A plat approved under this section is approved for recording purposes only, and if the land is later transferred to anyone outside that family definition it has to comply with the regulations in full. The middle route is the Large Lot Subdivision, whose application states the bargain on its face: "All lots must contain a minimum of five acres and no road construction is allowed as part of the subdivision." Five-acre minimums in exchange for staying out of the county's road specifications. The heaviest is a standard subdivision, where § 13-82 governs and the road is the cost — rights-of-way from 25 to 66 feet by class, paved surfaces, six inches of crusher run under two inches of binder and an inch and a half of topping on a local road, proofrolling with a fully loaded thirty-ton tandem dump truck, a hundred-foot cul-de-sac diameter to the right-of-way line, and a one-year warranty on the road. All three want the same package at submittal: deed or tax receipt, land survey, and eight originals of a scaled development plan by a licensed South Carolina surveyor showing the parcel boundary, all proposed lot boundaries and acreages, road and easement dimensions and any FEMA floodplain, plus SCDOT approval for a state-road encroachment and a state stormwater permit if more than an acre is graded. And before you buy an older undersized tract, read § 13-159: it can still be built on, but the ordinance administrator sets the setbacks, and the lot must be identifiable by an official recording date at the clerk of court's office to count as legally nonconforming.

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